Tag: voting

Election positivity

At times, this election campaign has made me really cranky. With politicians. With the media. With other Canadians.

But it hasn’t had all been bad. To my surprise, some things have actually been inspiring. Who would have expected that?

Votes mobs: The enthusiasm of youth

Inspired by a Rick Mercer rant, vote mobs are groups of young people who swarm political functions or other public spaces, encouraging people to vote.Will they actually turn around the typically dismal showing of voters under 25? I don’t know, especially that the timing couldn’t be worse for university and college students.

But regardless, they’ve left behind a nice YouTube legacy, like this one from McMaster:

The return of oratory

I’m a sucker for a great orator. Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kennedy… I don’t know if these guys were great leaders. But they sure talked nice. I loved listening to all of them.

In Canada, we haven’t  had a great federal orator since… What… Pierre Trudeau, I think?

Or so I thought. Until I actually started listening to Michael Ignatieff speak. It started at their platform announcement, part of which I watched online. This was in the midst of all the commentary about Harper’s “bubble” — not taking questions, hiding from the public. So to see Ignatieff speaking so easily, so clearly, sans notes or teleprompters, answering questions from everyone, at such a strategic juncture—I was kind of impressed.

I started to wonder if I was just in some weird Liberal spell here, when Rick Mercer (him again!) commented on a similar experience:

And then there was Prince Edward Island, where, in a curling club, Ignatieff showed off a set of skills I had no idea that he possessed. From a pure showbiz perspective he killed. Speaking without a teleprompter or notes he gave perhaps the best speech I have heard since watching Gen. Rick Hillier address the troops in Kandahar.

His speech also inspired this non-partisan song on voting for what you believe in–“Rise Up Canada!” (A song for Canada’s 2011 Federal Election):

Of course, people like Blair, Clinton, Obama, and Kennedy all had such personal charisma, their elocutionary skills were just icing on the cake. With Ignatieff, it’s the whole cake. In this day and age, that seems to not be enough. But damn, it’s nice to hear anyway.

Creative protest: Hanging with the cool kids

I like civil debate, and I like neutral calls to vote, but I have picked a side. So, I’ve also appreciated the many people, much more creative and eloquent than I, who have to the same conclusion about who they are voting for, and produced online materials as to why. There’s tons of it, but I’ll just mention a few. I’ve already tweeted about Shane Koycan’s powerful “Wasted Votes” video. (He’s the spoken-word poet who appeared at the Olympics by the way: the “We Are More” poem.) I also enjoyed Margaret Atwood’s comparison of the Conservatives to a vaccum salesman who insists you buy his product, but won’t tell you the cost.

And this mock ad—Too Smart for Canada—made me laugh out loud. So close to the actual ones, some people think it’s real.

The NDP surge

Of course, we don’t yet know if this will stick and have a real effect in the end. All we can know for sure, is that among those that were polled, there has been a shift. In Quebec, the NDP has risen considerably; that has been spreading to other regions. And why does this please me?

  • It’s thwarting the ambitions of both the Conservatives and the Bloc, my two least favourite parties. Although I don’t believe it will turn out that way, one poll actually had the NDP + Liberal seat count at greater than the Conservative–without the Bloc at all. That would be good for Canada.
  • It shows that many Canadians will respond to a positive message. (Even the NPD “attack” ads were kind of chirpy positive.)
  • It shows what a political leader can achieve when not hobbled by two years of personal political attack ads run by the party in power. (Why is it even legal to run election ads between elections, by way?)
  • They’re the only major party talking about electoral reform, one of my pet issues.

I’m not afraid of NDP policies or what them having more power might mean. All evidence shows that the NDP becomes very pragmatic once handed power. And if you look closely at what they’re proposing, it’s full of caveats that gives them plenty of wiggle room to ensure Canada does not become a deficit-ridden, high-tax, socialist mess.

But this is in no way changes how I plan to vote. The conditions, for me, remain the same. Local polls show no evidence of an NDP surge. Plus, my local NDP candidate is a 27-year-old with no political experience at all, whereas the Liberal one is a past MP with a record for actually going with his conscience against his own party, which is a rare thing indeed. And another thing I view positively.

And I can’t even blame this one all on Stephen Harper

This kinds of pisses me off:

Federal parties agree to scrap bill correcting voting inequalities

The Harper government and the opposition parties have agreed to quietly sink legislation that would have given Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta more seats in the House of Commons. As a result, urban and visible-minority voters will continue to be discriminated against in Parliament.

Under the legislation, Ontario would have received 18 new seats, British Columbia seven, and Alberta five, bringing all three provinces up to the level of representation in the House warranted by their populations.

Though the above is denied by the government, the bill has been given one day of debate so far, so it’s not exactly speeding on its way to passage. The fear, apparently, is of angering Quebec and Maritime voters.

So fellow Ontarians, BCers, and Albertans, if you really want to have an impact on the next federal election, you’d best move to another province, where your vote will actually have weight.

Because in Canada, everyone is equal. Only, some of us are more equal than others.

Doing my bit for democracy

For the first time in my life, I voted in the early polls. That’s it, I’m done. Now I can focus on a truly inspiring Canadian contest: Who is Canada’s favourite dancer? (Seriously, if you haven’t seen So You Think You Can Dance: Canada? You should. It’s been delightful so far.)

But the economy is tanking, the polls are tightening, and the election is beginning to look like a bit of a booby prize—whoever wins this one is going to be blamed for the bad times, even if it’s not their fault.

So with all the market turmoil, can we just forget about combating global warming now? Wouldn’t that be nice. Remember, economic crises—we’ve gotten over them before, we’ll get over them again. Ecological crises—not so much. I’m going to quote Andrew Nikiforuk quoting Thomas Friedman, because they’re both real conservative guys:

By Friedman’s evocative accounting, the globe has now entered the “Energy-Climate Era” and faces several hot emergencies: petropolitics (it gives power and money to leaders who have earned neither); dramatic climate disruption; the rise of middle classes in India and China; and a real weapon of mass destruction, the catastrophic loss of biodiversity in the world’s forests and oceans. The global economy has become “a monster truck with the gas pedal stuck and we’ve lost the key.” Unless we switch to cleaner fuels, “our lives will be reduced, redacted, and restricted.”

And we’ve got about 10 years to do it. Cheery, huh?

Also interesting—because I just haven’t heard about it anywhere else—was Doug Saunders article about a scheduled meeting between presidents of the EU and whoever is Prime Minister on October 14. Subject: A potential economic partnership with Europe. Problem: All the Canadian provinces would have to agree with this, and Canadian provinces don’t agree on much. Saunders blames Harper’s policy of “open federalism” for just making this disunity worse.

Despite Europe’s stock market also being in a “boomerang” crisis, it’s still likelier to be a healthier trading partner in the next few years than the US, the source of the collapse. And it would be nice to have a PM who wasn’t philosophically opposed to getting all the provinces into one trading agreement with that lucrative market.